“Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”

1993, PJ O'Rourke, Democracy in its diapers in Give war a chance (Picador):

It is the beauty of well designed fascism that it gives every piss-ant an ant hill to piss from.